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Ex-Cultist Dies In Suicide Pact; 2d Is 'Critical'

A former member of the Heaven's Gate cult was found dead today in a copycat suicide in a motel room near the scene of the group's mass suicide in San Diego County, and another former member was found unconscious in the same room, the authorities said.

San Diego County sheriff's officials said the two men were discovered, with trademark black Nikes and purple shrouds, in a $59 room at a Holiday Inn Express in the town of Encinitas. They said the scene was reminiscent of the discovery of 39 bodies of cult members on March 26, in a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, about four miles away and just north of San Diego.

''It was very similar in every way, only on a much smaller scale,'' said Lieut. Gerald L. Lipscomb, chief of the homicide unit of the Sheriff's Department.

The dead man was identified as Wayne Cooke, a sculptor and handyman whose wife, Suzanne Sylvia Cooke, 54, was one of the 39 cult members who swallowed barbiturates and vodka, dying in the belief they would then join a spaceship trailing the Hale-Bopp comet.

The other man, who has been hospitalized in critical condition, is Charles Humphreys, also known as Rick Edwards. He joined the group in 1975, and frequently left and returned thereafter, always maintaining an affiliation.

Mr. Cooke, who was about 56, had spent a total of four years in the group, in two periods, leaving it first in 1976 and again in 1994.

In an interview with The New York Times after the first suicides, in March, he was morose at having missed out on his former colleagues' supposed ascension and said he would probably join them.

''I am going to drop my shell one of these days,'' said Mr. Cooke, who was known within the cult as Justin and had lived most recently in Las Vegas, Nev. ''Hopefully, I will have another chance.''

He said he had always believed in the group's ideas, and blamed himself for not making enough progress toward erasing his own thoughts and replacing them with the group's teachings.

More recently, in an ''exit statement'' that he sent to his daughter, Kelly, he said his suicide would not accomplish the same thing as the achievement of his 39 ''classmates,'' who, he said, had been able to overcome their humanness.

''It seems likely,'' Mr. Cooke wrote, ''that I will be rescheduled for a future incarnation into a future classroom to complete my overcoming of mammalian behavior and to strengthen my connection with the Next Level Above Human.''

To resist suicide, he wrote, would be to ''settle for a place in this world.'' He said he hoped the suicides would ''wake some of you out of your slumber enough to acknowledge that just maybe the Next Level designed this world as a garden to grow souls.''

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CNN, which said it received a letter and videotaped statements from Mr. Cooke and Mr. Humphreys this morning, played a tape of Mr. Cooke saying: ''I am not dying. I'm not going to be dead. I'm simply leaving this vehicle,'' the cult members' term for their bodies.

Lieutenant Lipscomb said San Diego officials were alerted this morning by CNN, and by Lesley Stahl of the CBS News program ''60 Minutes,'' that they had received farewell messages made by the two men.

Investigators then spoke with Ms. Cooke, who told them that she believed that her father and a friend were planning to commit suicide in the San Diego area. Ms. Cooke had received a package from her father alerting her to his plans, and then called Ms. Stahl, the authorities said.

The authorities checked hotels in the area and found the men registered in Room 222 at the Holiday Inn Express on Leucadia Boulevard in Encinitas, a suburban community that adjoins Rancho Santa Fe.

Deputies arrived at the motel to find one man dead and the other unconscious and ''in pretty bad shape,'' said a Sheriff's Department spokesman, Ron Reina. The unconscious man, Mr. Humphreys, was taken to Scripps Hospital in Encinitas, where he was listed in critical condition late this afternoon.

A sheriff's spokesman, Sgt. Don Crist, said that Mr. Cooke had been found face down on the floor with a plastic bag on his head and that Mr. Humphreys had been found with a plastic bag near him. Both men had packed tote bags similar to those found by the cult members in March, when they joined their leader, Marshall Herff Applewhite, in a quest for extraterrestrial life after death.

Another former cult member, Michael Conyers, said in a telephone interview today that Mr. Humphreys, who the authorities said was believed to have lived most recently in Denver, was one of the group's earliest members. Mr. Humphreys left the group 15 or more times, only to keep returning, Mr. Conyers said.

''Chuck lived for the group, even though he kept leaving,'' Mr. Conyers said. ''As long as he felt connected with the group, he had a reason for living. Without them, he wouldn't have felt life was worth anything anymore.''

Referring to the cult's leaders, who at one point named themselves for tones on the musical scale, Mr. Conyers said, ''Do and Ti liked him, liked his honesty,'' which is why they let him move in and out.

''He had a tendency to use his own mind,'' Mr. Conyers said, ''which of course was a big no-no.''

Another former group member, Dick Joslyn, warned that there were still other former members who might be planning a similar end.

''There are at least nine people -- well, I guess seven now -- who are potential suicide participants,'' he said. ''This is really serious stuff. You know, the farewell tapes from the others said that if anyone wanted to follow, there was this thin window and you could do it.''

Mr. Cooke grew up on a farm in the Oklahoma Panhandle and from childhood was fascinated with the stars and heavens, he told The Times. He dropped out of the University of Kansas, wrote some plays, became a sculptor but was still searching for fulfillment. In 1975, his wife, Suzanne, went to one of Mr. Applewhite's meetings near San Francisco and brought home a tape for him to hear. They abandoned Kelly, who was then 10, and joined the group.

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A version of this article appears in print on May 7, 1997, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: Ex-Cultist Dies In Suicide Pact; 2d Is 'Critical'. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe